AN ENTHRALING FRESCO!
– Radio France Inter
Clerkenwell, London, 1930.
Vera lives in Little Italy with her parents – an illiterate father who tries to make himself invisible and a mother who seeks out the company of the dead in the cemeteries of east London.
As a teenager, Vera is attracted by Mussolini and fascism. But by 1940 Italy and Britain are at war and Churchill orders the arrest of thousands of Italian immigrants, her father among them. Deported to Canada he drowns with hundreds of others on the Arandora Star and Vera drifts aimlessly among the young Free French of Soho.
Her tragic story, so closely intertwined with the bigger history of the twentieth century makes The Ends of Stories one of the most compelling European contemporary explorations of identity.
